41–50 of 95 posts
Thanks for the laugh, I like your writing style but to echo others, I think you went a little extreme on the Anki.
On semi-related note, currently making on a language app (gengengo.com) if anyone wants to check it out.
I found Anki way too heavy and the available decks mostly wrong way around for actually learning vocabulary (that is they were from foreign language to native, instead of the other way around) and switching the direction was way too cumbersome. I have not yet found a really good tool for learning Mandarin, except for classes and actually talking with people and doing the hard work of writing the characters again and…
I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary t…
With tools like Google and Microsoft's neural TTS and Anki's AwesomeTTS add-on my cards have audio that is so realistic that I am also constantly exposed to near-native listening. I do 3-way cards (Writing only -> English, Audio only -> English, and English -> Other language) so I'm actually getting a reasonable simulation of real life practice (reading, listening, speaking) on an individual sentence basis. My process is: (1) find a high quality sentence from a book / app / website / ChatGPT (with verification from a native speaker); preferably one that is fairly simple apart from a single word or verb conjugation that I haven't learned yet, in keeping with the i+1 rule, (2) create an Anki card for that sentence using my own custom note templates, (3) add audio with AwesomeTTS. Creating a card like this takes me perhaps 10-20 seconds as its mostly just copy-pasting and clicking a few buttons.
Of course to become truly fluent you need practice. But when I practice I'm already able to follow the gist of conversations and I can stumble my way through speaking in most situations: I've got a huge head start thanks to all the latent vocabulary and grammar that my brain knows thanks to Anki, instead of having to constantly look blankly at the other person while I pull out Google Translate.
The Japanese immersion language learning rabbit hole goes very very deep, and it super interesting. I'm writing some info about it here because I just don't want it to be lost to the sands of the digital times: It all started way back when with this guy named Khatzumoto who did his own guerilla academic research, for lack for a better word - and proving it by getting fluent in 18 months. The theories were based in co…
> fluent in 18 months That's a very interesting definition of fluent.
Anki (US: /ˈɑːŋki/, UK: /ˈæŋki/; Japanese: [aŋki]) is a free and open-source flashcard program. It uses techniques from cognitive science such as active recall testing and spaced repetition to aid the user in memorization.[4][5] The name comes from the Japanese word for "memorization" (暗記).[6]
The SM-2 algorithm, created for SuperMemo in the late 1980s, has historically formed the basis of the spaced repetition methods employed in the program. Anki's implementation of the algorithm has been modified to allow priorities on cards and to show flashcards in order of their urgency. Anki 23.10+ also has a native implementation of the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS) algorithm, which allows for more optimal spacing of card repetitions.[7]
Anki is content-agnostic, and the cards are presented using HTML and may include text, images, sounds, videos,[8] and LaTeX equations. The decks of cards, along with the user's statistics, are stored in the open SQLite format.
I want to use my app mainly for language learning, but as a demo, I also have some geography cards that zoom in on a country on the world map, for the front side.
I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary t…
I can't agree with this when it comes to language learning specifically. I've used all sorts of tools to learn the language of my in-law side of the family: books, audio lessons, videos, tutoring, apps, etc. I've never made as much progress as I have with Anki. My language skills have improved in leaps and bounds so much with Anki that I now rarely bother with anything else, other than for sentence mining to create m…
I totally believe this. It's 100% in line with my observations about Duolingo. I know people who put in a lot of time into Duolingo and learned nothing. I gave it a try and despite the fact that I put maybe 50 hours into Italian (estimate) I learned nothing. I could get all the cards right, but I didn't learn any Italian (Over the years I've learned 3 languages in addition to my native language, so I know it's not my problem.) Eventually I realized that I did learn something but it wasn't the language. Somehow I just knew the right answers.
I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary t…
I couldn't give you a percentage, but I made most of my own cards, including all of those 2000+ kanji cards. There's lots of debate in the language learning community about vocab cards or sentence cards, and generally the ideal is the sentence cards, as it provides the context that helps you use is naturally (as opposed to literal translations from your native language).
> I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.
But imagine if it could!